Kmflett's Blog

Once Again on #Partygate & drinking at work(London office culture 1970s-2020s)

Boris and Carrie Johnson and Rishi Sunak are amongst 50 people to be fined for breaking lockdown rules by attending social events at Downing St. In the case of Johnson the fine was for a party on his birthday(19^th June 2020). It may not be the only fine he gets.

Tory MP Michael Fabricant whose relationship to reality and to his wig is at best limited has told the BBC that many have drink in their offices after hard day’s work including nurses and teachers.

As a management veteran of central London office culture I’d say that in 2020 it seems unlikely that alcohol would be consumed at a work meeting. That practice for a variety of reasons has long gone. Firstly because it’s not inclusive. Lots of people don’t drink and don’t want to be in a drinking environment. Offices are no longer the preserve of clean shaven white men in suits (alright I was never clean shaven and never wore a suit myself..) Secondly if you are actually doing serious work drinking does not help.

In short things have changed. I started office work in 1979 (for the same employer I’m still working for). My early managerial years were spent at the old HQ of the (then) London telephone region, 87 Albert Embankment SE1. There was a bar on the 11th floor that opened between 12-2 should one feel like a lunchtime pint or two. In the days before the interwebs and mobiles while you definitely had to attend the office to prove you were working you didn’t have to stay there. Placing the jacket on the back of the chair and leaving some papers on the desk was sufficient. Hence many afternoons were spent in the pub. If anything that serious came up a clerical messenger was despatched from the office to find you.

The senior manager I worked to in those days was a friend of John Young owner of Youngs Brewery and from time to time a cask of Youngs would be tapped in the office to mark some occasion or other.

I can’t place exactly when the tradition of office drinking stopped (for the reasons mentioned above) in London (it was certainly later elsewhere) but I think as the older wartime generation who were the mainstays of it retired. By the later 1990s it had gone.

That doesn’t mean to say that workplace drinking in the environs of the office not in it doesn’t still go on, but its definitively after work and given working hours in central London offices(when people are there) that might mean 6pm or after. Drinking in the office, at least outside of some official function (and even then increasingly rare) might be a disciplinary offence in many large offices.

Of course it might be argued that the Tories and Tory culture is stuck in the 1950s and so work drinking may still survive. If so they are even worse than I thought, if that’s possible….